Box Office Smash?

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is being hailed as a box office sensation after it grossed a little over $8 million on its opening night. By documentary standards, of course, that would be very good; but Moore’s film is no more a documentary than, say, The Passion.Fahrenheit 9/11 did manage to out-gross White Chicks, its main new-release competition. On the other hand, its opening weekend doesn’t shape up as well as Garfield’s, and it won’t attract as many opening-weekend viewers as Beavis and Butthead Do America. We Were Soldiers, perhaps a more relevant comparison, also had a stronger opening weekend (assuming Fahrenheit’s gross doesn’t increase greatly tonight).
My guess is that the audience for Moore’s hateful propaganda is limited, and the gate will fall off sharply after the first week or two. Like Air America, the value of Fahrenheit 9/11 to the Left lies not so much in people actually seeing it, as in the endless newspaper articles it will spawn.